India, which has so far reported over 100 cases of the highly transmissible variant, is staring at an uncertain future as it hopes to keep its daily infections below the 10,000-mark.
Unfortunately, the latest warning from the Centre has rung alarm bells for a country struggling to emerge out of the pandemic.
On Friday, Niti Aayog member VK Paul said that going by the spread of infections in UK, India could see up to 14 lakh daily cases considering its massive population.
Seeing as the Delta-driven second wave brought the entire healthcare system to its knees during April-May this year, such a prediction raises a glaring red flag for a Covid-weary India.
But can Omicron really lead to another explosion of cases in India? It’s hard to say for sure.
If anything, the unprecedented surge in South Africa and Britain will portend what the world, including India, can expect from the latest threat.
On Thursday, Britain reported 88,376 new infections, the highest since the start of the pandemic and up around 10,000 since the previous record set on Wednesday.
South Africa is also adding over 20,000 fresh cases to its tally every day, up from just around 200 at the start of November. Meanwhile, Denmark has reported the second most number of Omicron cases so far.
What’s adding to the fresh dilemma is the preliminary finding that Omicron could possibly evade immunity provided by two-dose vaccines, with the World Health Organization stressing on the potential requirement for booster shots.
However, on the flip side, there is also some hope that Omicron may not cause a devastation similar to what was seen during the Delta waves since the severity of the disease has so far been mild in majority of the patients.
Current situation in India
India’s daily cases have remained below the 10,000-mark for the past few days with no visible signs of a surge as of now. Its vaccination rate is also healthier with over 38% people fully vaccinated against Covid compared to just 26% in South Africa.
If previous infection, hybrid immunity and high vaccination do have an impact, then Omicron surge in India could be a lot milder than thought.
However, if India does witness a South Africa-like surge, the weekly cases could rise up to over 1 lakh per day by the fifth week of the surge.
Here’s the projection for Omicron spread in India if we apply the same rate of growth as is being witnessed in South Africa.
As per this projection, India could possibly witness up to 7-8 lakh weekly cases in the second month of the surge.
So far, there is no visible impact of the variant in India even as it has been two weeks since the first Omicron cases were detected in Karnataka on December 2.
But again, it is hard to tell when the Omicron strain actually started spreading in South Africa and how much of the new variant has penetrated the Indian population.
Moreover, since the government has to rely on genome sequencing to identify a Covid variant, there is always going to be a lag between the reported numbers and the actual situation on ground.
Manindra Agarwal, IIT scientist involved in the mathematical projection of trajectory of Covid-19, had predicted earlier this month that an Omicron-driven surge could peak in India by February next year with cases reaching up to 1-1.5 lakh per day.
However, he had said that the wave would be milder than the second one.
In a recent interview to TOI, Dr Anurag Agrawal, director at Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR), had said that India has reached a very high level of hybrid immunity following the second wave.
However, he warned that India should remain cautious since effectiveness of such immunity against Omicron, which has many more and different immune escape mutations, may not be as good as against Delta.